Quite frankly, I’ve been racking my brain the past several months trying to foresee how on earth mankind can possibly take back the planet, given the stage of the Orwellian state we already find ourselves living in. I’m not the only one who has been stymied for practical ideas. Many Truthers feel it’s hopeless, while others feel there must be a way but don’t for the life of them know what it is. We all agree sharing information is important, getting it out to a much wider public. Beyond that, the plan pretty much fogs over.

So I’ve been racking my brain, worrying actually, and tonight I asked, with great emotional focus and urgency, for the Infinite, along with those entities in the unseen who work for the freedom and happiness of all beings, to show a way out to all of us who seek it. In the hour that transpired, I felt a presence of another consciousness, that touched my forehead (“third eye”) with an invisible hand and then knelt beside my chair and transferred thoughts and images to me. What was that? Your guess. But here is what I saw in that exciting hour:

Step 1. The immediate need right now is to spread the information. We need a much broader knowledge base. Many or most of the Earth’s inhabitants need to awaken to what’s happening for mankind to defeat it. To get the information out, those of us who know the facts must speak of them not only to people we know but to our communities, offering free public lectures at community centers, libraries, and the like. “Citizens Against Big Brother Government” groups will form from these meetings and begin to work as activists locally, contacting leaders and government representatives, explaining the situation to the uninformed, exposing those who support the conspiracy, and demanding accountability. “Students Against Big Brother Government” should form groups on campuses, getting the knowledge out to other students. More information materials need to be created for making these presentations, tools that the groups can use in their efforts to educate the public and their leaders. Meanwhile, we must work with what we have, and our own knowledge and passion about the conspiracy.

Step 2. The second immediate need is for a shift in consciousness – an adjustment in the attitude of the Truthers. We must come to see the power of our minds in creating our future reality, that we control whether that reality turns out to be favorable or unfavorable. We must quickly start to recognize, as a group, that our thoughts determine our future, that nothing can happen to us that we don’t allow as a possibility in our minds, and that repeatedly imagining a negative future supports the likelihood of that future coming to pass. We need to perceive that insisting in our minds that our futures be bright and joyful, both for us personally and for our nation and humanity, is essential to our success. Every time we speak or think fatalistically, we hammer another nail into the coffin of freedom. We must give up cynical talk and demand better of our future from the Infinite, which is the source of all that is and fully capable of manifesting anything that we, its children, determine to create. Truthers need to learn the technique of creative visualization (see my article on this) and use it to manifest an alternative to the future that the Illuminati are visualizing. In fact, the global elite are using our own visualization against us, every time we imagine experiencing a fascist existence. Truthers need to call one another on cynicism and fatalism every time it crops up, nipping it in the bud each time the habit of hopelessness rears its ugly head. The future is not hopeless, unless we decide it is. If we decide it is, mankind truly has lost its hope.

Step 3: As Truthers struggling for hope make the shift from fear and discouragement to spiritual empowerment, the result will be minute changes in the way we see and do things. Our minds will start to perceive simpler, more natural ways of living – better choices we can make, affecting things like our families, our career, our relationship, where we live, and how we spend our time. Getting back to basics will stop seeming difficult or impossible, as doors of new thought and opportunity open. The move will be away from dependence on “the Cystem” and toward independence, which will look like different things for different people. In general, the trend will be toward getting off “the grid” and developing more sovereign means of living. Things like independent and community sources for food, water, and energy will become more accessible through the choices we make. We will move away from job positions that bore, humiliate or otherwise disempower us, into work we enjoy and find personal meaning in. Jobs that support the Cystem will fall away, being replaced by jobs that support life. Work that makes food, water, energy and other essentials of life available to people independent of the grid will grow in demand, as more and more people determine to get sovereign. The need for skilled trades people, for local food co-ops, and for organic farming will increase, as will the people employed in these areas. These changes in people’s habits will occur spontaneously, as a result of Step 2 (the shift from feeling helpless to having confidence in our power to create a free and joyous future).

Step 4: As our numbers grow from our efforts at spreading the word, and as we grow in personal empowerment, the face of world politics will quickly start to change. A Truther political party will develop in every country, becoming so popular and supported by so many citizens that it actually defeats the established parties in elections. While right now this seems like an impossibility, it will be not difficult in the near future, when our numbers have swelled in size to include a large percentage of humanity. When enough people wake up to the truth of our situation, what reason would they have to vote for either established party, when they see how both are run by the same deceivers bent on bringing the nation under even further surveillance and control? Spontaneously, the people will put up and vote for Truther candidates who will begin to transform governments. With every election, as our numbers grow, more Truthers will be elected, in time forming a majority in Congress, in Parliament, etc. When such a majority is reached, these government bodies will promptly dismantle laws that allow things like surveillance, free-speech zones, the United Nations, the European Union, funding for wars, and the insane national debts. National debts will be forgiven and the creditors who hold them will go away empty-handed. The banking system that allows imaginary money to be created will be abolished by law, along with the debts the imaginary money loans generated. The courts will be filled with decent judges, and laws will be reinstituted forbidding payments to legislators by special interest groups. Truther-filled governments will abolish the two-party system, and in fact they will abolish parties altogether. A fairer system of running for office, that’s resistant to corruption, will replace the current party system. The new method will allow anyone to run for office. Local areas will pick their favorite candidates from among local contestants, and the winners will go on to run in regional elections. The winners of the regional elections will proceed to the final ballot for national elections. Secret societies will become illegal, as will all methods of electronic surveillance. Anyone caught with a hidden camera filming the public, in a store or anywhere else, will be subject to fine or arrest.

Step 5: People will stop watching mainstream media stations and reading mainstream newspapers, while new television stations and newspapers arise to meet the demands of an aware public. The new public media will be conceived and operated by Truthers, and citizen journalism will no longer be a phenomenon restricted to the Internet. The current mainstream media will collapse due to lack of patronage and interest, and with it will crumble the Illuminati’s main propaganda machine. Truther-filled governments will make laws protecting the freedom of the Internet, and censorship will be a thing of the past. True investigative journalism will return to TV and the press.

Step 6: There will be a huge unemployment problem in the ranks of the Illuminati, whose sources of revenue will dry up as the world becomes aware of their schemes and makes their shenanigans in the stock markets and banking systems illegal. The elite will have to go to work like everybody else, learning trades and humble skills that support life. The Cystem will implode on itself, and when it goes, so will the lifestyle of those it served. Mankind, having awakened to the manipulation and eliminated it, will also have awakened to their power for self-determination. Empowered and free, fulfilled in their lives at last, they will have no motives for anger or revenge against the toppled Illuminati. They will feel only compassion for those entities, whose fear and separation from the Infinite led them to such miserable efforts to survive. In the new atmosphere of freedom that permeates the Earth, our former enslavers will find the permission to change and to heal. While that may be a painstaking process, they will find and regain their primordial goodness, the pure state of spirit they enjoyed when first they were conceived in the mind of the Infinite. Because at heart, they are that goodness, like everybody else.

Step 7: As mankind lives together in harmony, sovereignty, freedom, empowerment and fulfillment for the first time in recorded history, still greater levels of consciousness will become accessible to all. The need to kill to eat will fall away. The DNA weakness that ensures we disease, age and die will be corrected by consciousness, empowered by the Infinite that can override DNA and fill it with physical immortality. Poverty will be a thing of the past, and the need to work to live will drop by the wayside as all beings learn to live on the eternal light. With plenty of leisure time and a consciousness of joy and empowerment, people will experiment with and learn skills that once were considered impossible or to be the domain of magicians: teleporting, levitating, manifesting material objects from pure thought, dematerializing one’s body and rematerializing it again, traveling in seconds to other planets or other dimensions, and much more. Why will we do these things? For fun, and because we can, as we expand and enjoy the definition what it means to be living. Evil will no longer be perceived as unavoidable and necessary to life on earth. It will simply dissolve in the light of higher consciousness. As there was no evil in the mind of the Infinite when it dreamed its sweet dream of creation, so there will be no evil left in creation itself. As the changed consciousness on the planet grows more pure and powerful, it will inspire and trigger like changes across the universe and across all the dimensions. Creation will progress to a state where it reflects the original, joyous, divine intention as a perfect mirror of that dream in Infinite Mind. In that state, life will resemble a dance, a symphony, a tapestry, or a flower garden. Who knows where it will go from there?

Addendum:

I want to add a comment on what I expect some readers will be thinking: that this visionary scenario seems unrealistic because it entails lots more people waking up than seems possible in the time we have.

First of all, we don’t know how much time we have. Where did this 2012 thing come from anyway? So the Mayans ended their calendar there. They had to end it somewhere, or they’d have been writing forever. They ended it at the point where the sun passed a certain meridian in their sky chart. Maybe 2012 is going to be no bigger a deal than 2000 turned out to be with the Y2K scare. Maybe the year is being made into a big issue to cause fear in people, because fear feeds and strengthens the global agenda. It’s hard to tell, but maybe. The point is, we don’t know how much time we have, and we may have more than we think.

The second reason I believe enough people could wake up in time is that I saw the Western world go from a place that snorted in derision at the concepts of meditation and enlightenment to a place where those concepts seem to have become even more popular than the Christianity they’re intended to replace. All in a few short years. It happened through exactly the kind of techniques this article is describing: small local groups acting locally, spreading ideas through community lectures that we advertised through postering, radio PSAs, and articles (when we could get them) in newspapers (usually college papers or other non-mainstream press). Because it was happening all over the world, because thousands of enthusiastic kids started TM centers in communities everywhere, the word spread fast and pervasively, and it changed the Western world. So it doesn’t seem unrealistic to me that it could happen again, only with truth spreading this time instead of deception.

Still a third reason why this scenario seems doable is that truth is on our side. Truth has a tendency to reveal itself eventually (see my blog piece about this), and now seems to be the natural time. Why now? Because the reins of control are tightening and the invasions of privacy are growing, both exponentially. It’s hard for the public NOT to be aware of the conspiracy now at some level. People I broach the subject to are much less scornful of it than they were just a year ago, I think because of the course of recent events. This works very much to our advantage and makes our job lots easier. The closer the hunters approach with the snare, the greater the chance that the creature they’re after will detect them and escape.

We do have to get over our fear of what others think of us, of being laughed at or sounding foolish when we talk about an unpopular subject. Better to be ridiculed a bit now and be alive and free in ten years than to keep our mouths shut, keep looking cool, and soon be dead or microchipped. The hardest part at the moment is moving from the inertia of being an Internet research-and-discussion movement into the dynamic next stage of being an information-dissemination and activist movement. But once we find our stride, the action we need to take will start to come naturally.

This is a group David Icke is supporting, that has set itself the mission of coordinating information between community Truther groups that are now starting to form. Also check out this new DVD-set by David Icke that you may find useful in making public presentations. Divided into two one-hour segments, it can serve as an introduction to the conspiracy for people who are likely to be skeptical.

It’s time to jump on the band wagon! Together we can do this. It starts with one man, woman or student in one community.

In the book, Tredwell recounts her personal experience in the ashram, where she admits she was complicit in covering up all sorts of ashram secrets, in a misguided attempt to protect the guru’s misdeeds from public view (believing, as all guru cultists do, that the guru is God in human form and therefore exempt from human standards of right and wrong).

Tredwell’s riveting book recounts stories of donations intended for charity being converted into gold jewelry and hidden under the garments of Amma’s sanyasis (monks) as they passed through customs – then the gold being passed to Amma’s family to make them fabulously rich. Tredwell tells of being beaten, clawed, and bitten by Amma, who would succumb to fits of rage over small mistakes made by her attendants. Tredwell speaks of her discovery that, while claiming to be a lifelong celibate, Amma secretly had ongoing sexual affairs with several of her closest swamis (monks who have taken lifelong vows of celibacy).

Tredwell was extensively quoted in an August 2012 Rolling Stone article on Amma regarding some of these allegations. Rolling Stone was able to corroborate the claim of physical abuse by Amma through the testimony of another one of Amma’s female attendants, who would not reveal her name except to the magazine.

Holy Hell can be purchased through Amazon via this link. What follows below is the original article I wrote about Amma for this website, in 2008.

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This is Chapter 9 in an online book: ‘Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment: Confessions of a New Age Heretic,’ by Bronte Baxter.

What do stuffed dolls have to do with enlightenment? Lots, if you’re into the cult of Amma, known also as Ammachi, Mata Amritanandamayi, and “the hugging saint.”

Amma’s devotees talk to dolls made in her image that are sold on Amma retreats. They tell the doll their problems, seek its comfort, and listen in their minds for its advice. Amma calls the devotees her children, and clucks syllables like baby talk into their ear in her trademark ritual of lining people up, watching them kneel before her, then embracing them.

She tells them she is their mother and that she hears their prayers. She says she’d no more charge them for her darshan (i.e., being in her presence) than a mother would charge an infant for breast milk. Yet insiders have estimated Amma rakes in upwards of 3 million dollars in a 7-week tour, through donations and sales of items like her toothbrush, fragments of a garment she has sat on, Amma dolls, Amma posters, and books by devotees extolling her divinity.

Devotees believe Amma is a living incarnation of the being they consider the supreme God: Kali in Hindu religion, who is depicted in Indian art wearing a necklace of bloody human skulls and a girdle of severed arms but who somehow translates to devotees as a loving maternal figure. Amma events consist of childlike lectures on Hindu doctrines, Amma blessing water which devotees then drink, hymn singing, worship ceremonies, and the hugs. At some events, Amma wears a one-foot-high sparkling crown.

Amma marries people on stage, gives babies their first taste of solid food, tells couples to break up or to stay together, and ordains some of the faithful to abandon their family and live as monks in her ashram. Amma teaches that love is all we need, and it is her divine love that will save us.

In Seattle a couple of months ago, she predicted nuclear war and that no child younger than 5 will live to adulthood after the year 2012. After spreading fear and despair through such prophecies, she announced that only meditation and self-effacing acts of charity can possibly mitigate the sentence for humanity. “Meditation” means mantra/obeisance meditation to the divine mother. Self-effacing charity means donations to her organization and service to her cause.

At public sessions, devotees chant hymns to Amma that grow in volume and frenetic intensity, gesticulating in unison with their arms in the shape of an arc, from their midsection up and out towards Amma, who sits on a dais in front of them. The words of the chant are “Aum Parashaktyai Namah.” That translates to “I bow down/ pay homage to the Supreme Mother of the Universe.” The arm gesture is body language for surrendering one’s soul to Kali in the form Amma, her living embodiment.

I am one of the moderators of the Ex-Amma Forum, a place where people who’ve left the Amma cult come together to help each other heal from their ordeal. The group is open to ex-followers, questioning devotees, concerned family and friends of devotees, and people seeking more information. I became involved with the forum when I watched a close friend of mine grow farther and farther away from the person he once was, the deeper he sank into Amma’s hypnotic embrace. On the forum, I’ve read hundreds of first-person accounts of what people experience with Amma, the side of her no one wants to talk about.

I’ve seen an email from her former joint-secretary alleging she cooks the books, that the money she gathers for charity doesn’t go to the charities she claims. I’ve read accounts by her former monks of the unexplained wealth of Amma’s family, how her charity hospitals won’t take the very poor because the poor don’t have money enough for treatment. I’ve read about“suicides”and unexplained deaths of ashram devotees. So many dead bodies have appeared in the waters outside the ashram that The Indian Express, New Delhi’s daily newspaper, printed an account of local citizens demanding a police investigation into the matter.

I’ve read of alleged organ selling and newspaper reports of beatings. I saw a video of Amma performing a puja (worship ceremony) to a portrait of Sai Baba, the guru who gives penis massages to his favorite boy disciples. I read a letter from a former Amma monk alleging he was told by an Indian holy man not to share what he knows about Amma if he values his safety.

Amma’s website sells pujas performed on behalf of the paying devotee for prices ranging from $30 to $250. We read there an explanation of what happens in Kali puja, which is performed “on Amma’s birthstar”:

“The puja is offered to a lamp representing the Goddess… The puja starts with a worship of the Guru… The central aspect of the puja is the symbolic offering of the five elements of creation to God. Our body is composed from these five elements… The puja symbolizes the surrender of the devotee to God… Each element is represented by a material symbol, such as flowers, or fire… These are offered at the foot of the lighted lamp. The desire of the devotee to offer his or her surrender is effected by these symbolic offerings. During the entire puja the temple resonates with the continuous chanting of the holy names of Kali.” (emphasis mine)

Amma’s PR is impeccable. She presents as “the hugging saint,” a portrait of sweetness and universal love, and the media promotes her unquestioningly as such. There has never been an investigation into her movement, the dead bodies, where the money goes, or what is really happening in her hospitals and orphanages in India.

In July, 2005, the United Nations awarded Amma with “Special U.N. Consultative Status,” according to her website. She is one of 25 core leaders in the United Nations Parliament of World Religions. Her website contains over a dozen pages extolling the humanitarian work of the U.N. One page compares the U.N.’s “Millenium Goals” with Amma’s goals, which are word-for-word identical. (Click here to view both documents.)

The ashram is among 30 Indian NGO’s to receive formal U.N. affiliation, according to Amma’s website. “This will provide opportunities for joint collaboration” between the U.N. and her organization, it goes on to state. Amma’s website openly extols the U.N. for its advances toward global government:

“The United Nations has been in the forefront of tackling problems as they take on an international dimension, providing the legal framework for regulating the use of the oceans, protecting the environment, regulating migrant labor, curbing drug trafficking and combating terrorism, to mention a few. This work continues today, with the United Nations providing input into the trend towards a greater centrality of international law ingoverning interaction across a wide spectrum of issues.” (emphasis mine)

Pulling all this together, what are we seeing here? Amma is a globalist, working intimately with the U.N. to bring about its agenda. That agenda is world regulation and control – a wolf that hides in the sheep’s clothing of humanitarian ideals. The U.N.’s aim is a global Orweillian state held in place by a world bank, a centrally controlled media, a world “peace-keeping unit” (world army), technological surveillance, and control of the world’s water, food, and other life-essential resources.

As one of the 25 core leaders in the U.N.’s religion parliament, Amma supports and promotes these “Big Brother” goals. For anyone wondering if the efforts by the global elite to create a New World Order have a spiritual component, Amma provides ample evidence.

My earlier articles in the “Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment” series explain the real meaning of the kind of surrender that Amma and other Indian gurus promote among their followers. It is surrender of the personal self to the gods, whom Amma calls “the Lord.” Amma’s hugs, her relics, her blessed water and food, are ways of infusing her energy signature into the minds and bodies of those who visit her, be they devotees or unsuspecting guests. Not only her energy signature but, I submit, the energy signature of the astral entities who work through her, who call themselves gods, and who feed on the psyches of mankind.

Amma’s energy transfer helps devotees entrain with her vibration and meld their minds and souls with “the godhead.” In other words, it helps them become assimilated, or possessed by the same “cosmic” forces that possess and work through Amma. Gurus call such a change in consciousness “attaining enlightenment” or “liberation.” It’s a state of “ego death,” where one no longer functions as an independent individual but as a receptacle of “the Supreme Consciousness.” Translation: as a tentacle of the astral entities who live off human worship and suffering.

What makes Amma both so successful and so sinister is the loving image she hides behind. The media uses it to promote her far and wide. If it seems remarkable that no investigative reporting has been done, that no one from the mainstream media has questioned Amma’s PR, the mystery evaporates when we recall who the mainstream media is run by these days.

Large corporations have bought and own our press and television, and dictate the “news” that journalists are permitted to report. Behind those corporations, as behind our governments, lurk the privileged aristocracy, who control both news and world events by means of puppets who do their bidding. Our world leaders, the mainstream media, and “the saint” Amma work in tandem. That’s why the media and world leaders sing her praises.

Why do I single out Amma among the dozens of gurus I could write about? Because she is so popular, and so unquestioned. Even that guru-busting website, Guruphiliac, seems to miss the shadiness of Amma, voting her the “least bad” of the gurus. But Amma is one of the worst. Powerful and successful, she ropes in new recruits by the thousands on her yearly worldwide tours. Amma’s movement claims that the “saint” has hugged over 26-million people – people who often return as devotees, worshipping her godhood and donating to her coffers.

Amma’s brand of religion is a return to the infantile. She makes babies of grown men and women, giving them dolls to babble to and telling them she’s their mother. While speaking fine words about “the God within each of us,” her actions teach something different. Allowing people to pray to you, kneel to you, and worship you as God Incarnate is not the behavior of someone who wants people to recognize themselves as magnificent, powerful expressions of God.

Amma’s disciples get their power from hugs, dolls, mantra obeisance, and the group euphoria of retreats, not from the core of their own being. They’re conditioned to believe that their inner self is less than the glorious entity before them. They’re told, in fact, that their unique, individual personhood is nothing but a self-serving “ego” – flawed, proud, and devious, something to be destroyed before they can be happy. Every time they bow down to Amma and “the gods” who work through her, Amma’s devotees shut the door more tightly on the divinity within themselves.

It’s a tragedy, but we can stop it: by spreading this information far and wide. When enough people know the other side of Amma, her crown and power will topple. Just as the global government she promotes will crash down about itself when the public sees through the fairy tales.

“The emperor has no clothes.” Pass it on. Once the message ripples through the crowd, the game will be up, and the illusion will be over.

Such beautiful sentiments. Love is the balm that heals the heart, and oneness the reality that joins us. But spiritual teachers with an agenda use “love” and “oneness” teachings to keep the lid down on their disciples’ spiritual development.

Let’s look at these teachings one at a time and see how they are used to manipulate. When a teacher or religion preaches love, at first glance that seems to be a good thing. It encourages people to be selfless and to help their fellows. Because of “love” teachings, religious people give to the poor, volunteer their time, and bite their tongue a lot. They say “the right thing” and don’t do things that other people won’t like. They put their desires on the backburner and focus instead on doing what they think will make others happy. Whenever sentiments of discontent or rebellion arise, they quash them with the stern heel of conscience. They know such feelings are from the dark side, and that they must be vigilant against them.

Years go by, and these well-meaning people become frustrated and repressed. The rebellion in them grows, because they are not listening to themselves. Their soul cries out for experiences, for learning through experience, but they have been taught that personal desires are selfish, so the cries of their soul go unheeded. They grow depressed or angry, because their purpose of embodiment in human form has been thwarted. The frustration comes out in many negative ways: short-temperedness, jealousy, vindictiveness, gossip, judgmentalness.

The sincere people who faithfully follow “love” teachings typically live in a box with the lid down, able to express but little of themselves because instinctual wants are considered suspect or evil. Repressed, their souls turn miserable or spiteful, like a dog chained for years to a stake. “See, it’s a bad dog,” people say when the animal snarls and nips, convinced by such nasty behavior that they were right in chaining that animal all along.

Telling people to be unselfish creates a shadow personality inside them, the very “ego” that religions decry and that wouldn’t exist without religion. It’s ego, teachers preach, that makes the spirit discontent and rebellious. The vices their followers find in their private hearts are proof that the soul is a tainted thing, needing to be risen above or controlled.

So people redouble their efforts to be kind and loving. They volunteer more time, give more money to their church or their guru, and bite their tongue so hard that it hurts. But their “wicked” spirit only becomes sulkier, their negative thoughts stronger, their suppressed rage greater.

The spiritual teacher has, of course, the solution to all this. The Christian struggling with wicked thoughts is told to surrender his soul to Jesus. The disciple plagued by negativity is told to surrender her ego to Oneness Consciousness. It amounts to the same thing. Spiritual aspirants must make an oblation of the will (the soul’s chief attribute and mode of expression) to something perceived as greater and purer than themselves. If they do this, God, they are promised, will destroy the evil in their hearts. Oneness, or Brahman Consciousness, will dissolve their selfish cravings and negative mental chatter. The soul will melt away into the wholeness that is their true cosmic nature, or into the love that is Jesus. The troublesome entity they have fought with for years, their inner self, will be gone. In its place will come a peace that surpasseth understanding, the presence of the Divine alive in their heart.

People who succeed in going the final steps to such surrender do indeed experience peace, but it is the peace of spiritual death. Gone is the cry of their spirit for expression, for freedom to live and do things in the world. Gone is the frustration of the heart that lived in a box all its life. All noise is silenced. The soul has been snuffed out. All that exists in the shell called the body is the presence of something else: a new, “holy” or “cosmic” consciousness.

The consciousness that takes over when we surrender our souls only claims to be divine or of the Source. It is a consciousness that hates life, that abhors uniqueness and diversity. It wants to wipe out the creative spark whose expression was the purpose of creation. That spark, individual consciousness, burst forth from the Source Consciousness in a brilliant firework display at the beginning of time. We are those sparks, children of the Infinite, and our play and display is the reason for the world.

The play has been thwarted for millenniums. The display has been forbidden. Any original impulses that don’t align with institutionalized spiritual programming, in religions of East or West, are judged egoistic or evil. While a few people in society break free from these fetters (becoming our artists, our inventors, our thinkers), most of mankind lives under the yoke of spiritual repression, judging their deepest instincts as suspect, selfish, and wrong.

So we live in miserable marriages, work at miserable jobs, go places we don’t want to go for the “happiness” of our families, and do things we don’t want to do to help the less fortunate. Religious people work so hard to make sure everyone else is happy, but no one does anything that makes anyone happy, because happiness is a luxury they’re told they have no right to expect or experience.

I remember as a girl, how Sundays my family would sit around asking one another how they’d like to spend the day. “Would you like to go to the park?” one person would ask. “I don’t know, would you like to go to the park?” would come the reply. Everyone was so busy being unselfish, trying to do what the others supposedly wanted, that no one ever answered honestly about what they thought would be fun. So we went to the park or museum, never knowing if even one family member really wanted to go there. We were that intent on being good Christians, on sacrificing our personal desires for the sake of everyone else. We thought that made us moral and pleasing to God.

I often think of this sad and ridiculous scenario that was acted out so many times when I was growing up, and what a metaphor it is for all decisions that are based on repressing our inner spark for the supposed higher good. What if instead we all listened to the promptings in our hearts, without judgment? What if we stopped calling those promptings “ego” and considered them messages from the divine within us, messages there to guide us through life?

Those who have succumbed to the teaching that the ego is a self-serving, antisocial, anti-spiritual entity that lives inside waiting to undermine, can never free the creative spark and do the things that truly bring happiness to themselves and to others. When we trust our desires and stop judging them as selfish, the nastiness that once accrued to our inner spirit strangely disappears. The soul isn’t repressed anymore. It is free and expressing, fulfilling its divine promptings. Gone is its envy toward others, its anger and resentment. The soul fills with its own innate joy, and wishes no less for everybody else.

Egoism and evil are not born of this entity; they are born of repressing this entity. Left to itself, unjudged and uncensored, the soul desires good things for itself and for all creation. So where is the selfishness?

Spiritual teachers tell us to love, but true love is never born of an edict. Love is not biting your tongue, doing what someone else wants, repressing your desires, giving money to charity or doing prescribed service. All those things come from an effort at love, not from having love. When you have love, you need no mandates. Love is a tenderness of feeling, an empathy to what another is going through, a perception of the beauty in another.

Not only is a mandate not needed for real love – a mandate is useless in bringing love about. How can a spiritual rule make you feel tenderness or empathy, or appreciation of beauty? Only an open soul can experience those things. A soul shrouded in judgment of itself as egoistic and selfish cannot feel tenderness, empathy or appreciation. It is way too hurt and closed for such delicate feelings. Expecting a judged soul to bloom forth in genuine love is like expecting a seedling you poured drain cleaner on, to sprout forth in beautiful, new, green shoots.

Any spiritual leader who makes love the core of their teaching or who talks of dissolving the “small self” or “ego” leads mankind further into the dark. A truly awake person knows that love cannot be achieved through effort and that egoism is the product of self-flagellation. The truly awake don’t tell people to be loving, they suggest people be true to themselves. They advise self-trust. They are also aware of the nature of religion and its destructive role in the world. They speak out against it in all its forms.

Truly spiritual people recognize that religions use teachings of love and oneness to manipulate humanity into first judging and then surrendering their precious, unique souls (in the form of their will). They perceive that someone stands to gain from this, those who stand at the top of religions, those who call themselves God, gods, or gurus. They know that the true God, the Source Consciousness, has no need for worship and never mandated such. They know that anyone asking for adulation is less than Infinite, less than divine – an imposter pretending to be those things.

The truly aware know that Source Consciousness wants only that its purpose in creation be fulfilled: the play and display of happiness, in a myriad expression of souls, unique in their wonderful forms. They know that religion’s teachings of mandated love and dissolving ego thwart the Infinite’s purpose by destroying those souls.

People who know the truth encourage free expression, independence, individuality. They cheer for things like questioning, dissent, and nonconformity. They never codify “truth” and they never set themselves up as “teachers.” They don’t allow others to put them on a pedestal. They don’t appear on the rolls of “the holy” or “the Self-realized.” They are simple, confident people going about their lives with the light on inside.

No one turns to them as gurus or quotes them as spiritual authorities. They bring light to the world by being who they are and living freely and differently. Their joy and originality inspire those around them to re-evaluate the shrunken, judged personhood inside themselves, to consider whether it, too, might be capable of such luminosity. The truly awake inspire envy and anger in many, whose first reaction to the possibility of freedom is outrage, because it means they may have been traveling in the wrong direction all their lives.

Love is the sweetest expression of life, the flower of God’s creation. Oneness is our deepest nature, the place we all join with God (to quote the poet, Matthew Arnold) like islands “linking (our) coral arms beneath the sea.” Love and Oneness – what could be better?

But teachings that tell us to practice love and to surrender to Oneness are quite another thing. There are those who would twist mankind’s natural spiritual instincts to serve their sinister purposes. Love and Oneness are their calling cards.

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NOTE TO COMMENTERS:

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Longer comments, off-topic comments, as well as back-and-forth discussion between posters are now restricted to the Yahoo Groups forum created for that purpose. Bronte Baxter does not affiliate with new forum, and the comments there do not represent her opinions. Any reader may access the “Splinter” discussion group at:

I’ve observed a curious phenomenon among most “spiritual” people I know: the tendency toward wholehearted support for all observations about the delusions of other people’s cults alongside myopia toward the parallel delusions in their own. In saying “cults,” I include religions. Religions are cults that the delusions of large populations have made respectable in mainstream society. When it’s socially respectable, spiritual servitude is called religion. When it’s not, it’s called a cult.

Christians, for instance, are aware of some of the pitfalls in New Age spirituality. They do a good job of exposing these in their writings, but cannot see how Jesus with his father, Jehovah the Genocider, are anything but divine. Western guru followers often ridicule the naiveté of Christians but can’t perceive how obsequiousness to their guru is no different than worship of the Christ.

On my blog, commenters cheer iconoclastic articles until I strike on the teacher or spiritual figure they personally have pinned their hopes on. Then their writing takes a different tone. We spurn channelers but root for Eckhart Tolle. We scoff at Amma or Sai Baba but revere that little guru we met in the Himalayas. Perhaps we shake our heads at the folly of all of them, then pray to sylphs or await the arrival of the Galactic Federation to fix the messes on Earth.

Folly is the right word for all of this. How can we say we’ve seen through the illusions of our time when we give our power to anything other than the God within? When we revere anyone other than that First Cause as the font of truth?

We have this need to believe in some spiritual teacher, to be guided by some spiritual system, yet we realize deceptions surround us. If we address the insecurity behind our dogged insistence on protective figures and comforting codifications of “truth,” we finally make contact with the Infinite – the only true security. Instead of doing that, many people try to resolve the dichotomy by cutting loose a bunch of old beliefs and transferring their trust and idolatry to a single new focus, an entity who talks a better talk.

This is yet another detour, but the people who take it close their minds to seeing it. They still aren’t ready to accept responsibility, to trust completely the Infinite within them and wake up. They aren’t ready to take that last step to spiritual adulthood.

Why do people brag about becoming impervious to deception when they continue falling for old tricks dressed up in new finery? I think because it makes us feel safe, beyond the ken of mistakes. But self-congratulation, when we don’t deserve it, is a dangerous thing, making us careless and overconfident. We walk right into the next snare.

I find my energy flagging when I read comments on this blog that defend entrenched illusions, especially when posters remain staunch in their positions which are so very far away from the message I started this blog to share. The comment section is increasingly becoming the domain of a small handful of these people. In light of these two facts, I’m making the following changes in procedure beginning with this article:

A Yahoo Groups discussion forum has been started where readers of this blog can discuss among themselves whatever they wish. Anyone can access the new forum at:

I will not affiliate with the new forum, and the comments there do not represent my opinions. I may or may not occasionally leave comments there.

The comment section of this blog will from now on be reserved for short remarks (up to 12 lines) relevant to the article and for information readers wish to contribute that is relevant to the subject. Longer comments, off-topic comments, as well as back-and-forth discussion between posters is from now on restricted to the Yahoo Groups forum created for this purpose.

If technical kinks appear in the new discussion forum in the beginning, please let me know about them by email at brontebaxter8@yahoo.com

I hope this will get the blog back on track to pursue its original purpose and allow the people who want to take it in different directions to have their own forum and go in any direction they wish.

that is inviting open comment and discussion on all points custodial (anything to do with manipulation by spiritual forces). I agree with much of what this writer is saying, and totally disagree with some of it (such as his position on Jesus). But ClearEyes, the blogger, strikes me as sincere and intelligent, with many stimulating ideas worth contemplating. Drop in and visit.